Eyes Wide Shut

Wed April 26, 2017, 7:30 PM

After Dr. Bill Hartford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

"Eyes Wide Shut," his first film since "Full Metal Jacket" 12
years ago, will have to stand as his final statement. It's as rich
and strange and riveting as any journey he's taken us on, yet it's
also familiar in a disquieting way. Kubrick's trademark lighting,
his unique use of tracking shots, even the changing skin tones of
the actors are instantly recognizable. So are the themes he
chooses to explore.

"Fear and Desire" was Kubrick's debut feature film, and it could
just as easily have served as the title of "Eyes Wide Shut." In
the first scenes, he establishes an uneasy status quo between a
long-married Manhattan couple, Bill and Alice Harford (played by
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), only to puncture it with a series
of startling temptations and revelations.

She dances with a seductive older stranger, he is pursued by two
young models simultaneously, but neither Harford succumbs. They
end up in bed together, discussing the evening's possibilities in
a marijuana-enhanced haze.

A medical doctor, he thinks the pot is making her aggressive. She
wonders how he feels when he examines his female patients, then
proceeds to tell him of an event from their past that amounted to
a kind of adultery. The admission leaves him visibly shaken,
uncertain where their marriage is headed.

After an episode in which a heroin-cocaine overdose interrupts a
lavish Christmas party, it seems that every scene could be taking
place in a different room of the grotesquely expansive Overlook
Hotel from Kubrick's 1980 film of "The Shining." No matter where
Bill turns, he finds himself facing distortion, betrayal, violence
and sexual hunger.

He leaves his wife to console an out-of-control woman whose
father has just died, then finds himself accepting a hooker's
invitation, getting pushed around by gay-bashers and visiting an
old musician friend (Todd Field) whose latest gig involves playing
piano for secret orgies. Bill decides to tag along, but he'll need
a costume first, and even that gets terribly complicated.

Much of the picture suggests an erotic fever dream rather than a
realistic story. Even the sidewalks of New York and the Christmas
lights that twinkle in the background look stylized; so does the
orgy, which resembles a satanic rite as staged in a Hammer horror
film. But as Bill would have it, and his wife later demonstrates,
"no dream is ever just a dream."